Wisconsin’s Tenure Battle Shifts to Campuses

The fight over the University of Wisconsin system’s tenure and layoff policies is not over yet. Faculty leaders there hope to regain at the campus level what they just lost at the state level: a guaranteed say in any decisions to jettison academic programs and their tenured professors.

Having failed last week to dissuade the university’s Board of Regents from stripping them of such powers under system policy, faculty representatives plan to urge their campuses to adopt policies restoring at least some of the job protections and influence over layoffs they held previously.

The task is daunting. The campus policies would need to win the approval of the very same Board of Regents that just voted overwhelmingly to abolish them at the system level. Looming over the discussions would be the threat of a backlash from state lawmakers. Last year those lawmakers deleted references to such faculty powers and protections from state statutes to give campus chancellors more flexibility to scrap academic programs.

The university system’s flagship campus, in Madison, plans to submit a draft of its policies to the regents next month. How the board responds will guide the development of new policies elsewhere.

“I can say, categorically, that we hope to follow Madison’s policy,” said James Hartwick, a professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, who is chairman of that campus’s Faculty Senate.

He said faculty members across the system, whom he helped represent in an unsuccessful effort to persuade the regents to fully restore the tenure protections once enshrined in state law, hope that “tenure in Wisconsin will be tenure in Wisconsin, and not tenure of different types,” depending on the campus.

Madison is “going to be the canary in the coal mine,” said Holly Hassel, a professor of English at the university’s Marathon County campus, who is head of the steering committee for the faculty senate of the system’s 13 two-year colleges. “We need them to advocate for the strongest possible policies,” to test the limits of what the board will accept, she said.

Regina M. Millner, the board’s president, declined this week to comment on any policy that the Madison campus might propose. But she said the board had no desire to micromanage how campuses handle decisions such as whether to discontinue programs. As long as campus policies remain within the intentionally broad confines of the system policies adopted last week, she said, “there should not be any problems.”

Ms. Millner added, however, that educational considerations raised by faculty members can no longer trump financial considerations when it comes to decisions on closing academic programs. Any such decision must be both “educational and financial,” she said.

Fighting Fear

Of the various system policies just adopted by the regents, the one dealing with program discontinuance and faculty layoffs was by far the most contentious. Faculty leaders tried to persuade the board to amend that policy with provisions giving faculty committees a role in such decisions, calling for educational considerations to take priority over financial ones, and requiring chancellors to pursue (rather than simply consider) all feasible alternatives to faculty layoffs.

The American Association of University Professors denounced last week’s board votes as a weakening of tenure and part of “an ongoing attack on the University of Wisconsin as a public good.”

Raymond W. Cross, the university system’s president, this week challenged the idea that the board had stripped faculty members of tenure protections or any voice in decisions on academic programs. Campuses can still adopt procedures for making such decisions, tailored to their specific needs, that account for faculty recommendations, he said.

“Faculty are reacting to their fears,” Mr. Cross said, “rather than the substance of what is being debated.”

Campus chancellors have similarly sought to assuage tenured professors’ concerns about their job protections and role in shared governance.

James Schmidt, chancellor at Eau Claire, said that any decisions by chancellors to lay off even a few tenured faculty members would be “very rare” because “it drastically impedes your ability to attract the best and brightest faculty.”

Rebecca M. Blank, chancellor of the Madison campus, responded to last week’s board votes with a written statement. “I am concerned that some of the conversations around these issues suggest that the interests of chancellors and faculty are not aligned,” she said. “I believe that we can only maintain the quality of this university if we continue our long tradition of collaboration.”

She declined a Chronicle request for comment on her campus’s proposed tenure and layoff policies, drafted by administrators and faculty members there last fall.

Political Sensitivities

That proposal, which was approved by Madison’s Faculty Senate in November, would require that any restructuring or elimination of an academic program be approved by the affected department and the faculty panel in charge of academic planning in that area.

President Cross said this week that the provision “would not comport with board policy” and needed to be changed. It remains unclear, however, whether Madison will revise its proposals before sending them to the board or wait for the board’s decision on which aspects do not pass muster.

The Board of Regents could take it upon itself to alter the Madison policy, but Mr. Cross predicted that any changes it made would be technical tweaks, such as updates or corrections of system-policy citations. Noel Radomski, director of the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education, said any substantive amendments of campus policies by the regents “would be a dramatic mistake,” greatly complicating relations between chancellors and the system’s administration.

Faculty leaders have their own worries about the political repercussions of their actions. Some declined to comment on plans to try to shore up tenure and shared governance at the campus level, citing worries about a backlash from state lawmakers. Ms. Hassel, of the system’s two-year campus in Marathon County, said such a perspective “reveals just how anxious and under assault a lot of our faculty feel.”

“We should speak up anyway, because it is the right thing to do,” said David J. Vanness, president of the Madison campus’s chapter of the AAUP.

When it comes to discontinuing programs, faculty members at Madison — which has healthy enrollments and major sources of revenue beyond tuition and tight state budgets — have much less to fear than their colleagues at two-year campuses or struggling four-year campuses like Parkside and Superior, Mr. Radomski said.

He predicted that after the debate over Madison’s policies, calm will eventually return to other campuses, as faculty members deal with less uncertainty over policies and chancellors show a hesitancy to lay off faculty members any more than necessary.

The national AAUP office has said it will monitor developments in Wisconsin and might take action against the system or a campus if it sees faculty rights being trampled. “The real trigger,” Mr. Vanness said, “will be the first pink slip.”

Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.